MBA2535 Why Your 9-5 is Risky

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Hey everyone, welcome back to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. I'm your host Omar Zenholm and in today's lesson you'll learn why your 9 to 5 job is risky. We often talk about the stability of a 9 to 5 job, but today I want to flip the script. I want to flip the narrative and show you the hidden risks that come with relying solely on your traditional job. Many people think that entrepreneurship is risky in that having a job is the safest thing you could do. Well, in today's lesson I'm going to show you why that is false. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Did you know that 40% of Americans don't have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency? This is according to a study by the Federal Reserve. This financial vulnerability is often tied to the limitations of having a single income stream from your 9 to 5 job. So we're going to explore today why this so called stability might be really risky. My goal in today's lesson is to make this a no brainer for you. So by the end of the lesson you're like of course I don't know why I didn't see it this way before. And my first step in that process is to re emphasize this idea that when you have a job it's a single income stream. You're relying on that single source of income, your 9 to 5 job, to pay all your bills, to take care of your whole life and create this financial security for yourself if something happens, if you lose your job, right? And we're going to talk about how likely this is, okay? But if you lose your job due to something out of your control, economic downturn, corporate restructuring, a personal health issue, right? Your entire financial stability could be wiped out overnight. Who's going to pay the bills? Your mortgage, your food, your family, your insurance. All this stuff is tied into this job that is relying on the fact that it's always there. Now, there are different jobs with different kind of safety mechanisms like a pension or maybe a severance pay. But most of the time it's not enough for you to feel secure that you're going to be fine for the rest of your life. Think about the thousands of people who lost their jobs during the 2008 financial crisis or during the COVID 19 pandemic. Many were left scrambling because they relied solely on their job on that paycheck. Okay? There is a lot of volatility in the market. I know this as an employer, as a business owner, I see this all the time. The job market is unpredictable. Industries evolve, companies emerge. An entire job category could be wiped out because of technology like AI. And it's really hard to predict. Like, when AI came out, a lot of people thought, oh, AI is going to replace a lot of people that do, like data entry or secretarial jobs. But in fact, what happened is that AI took on the tasks of high creative jobs like writing and scripting and editing and video and images, right? It's. It's really hard to know where the world is going. And therefore you don't know if your job is secure. Just like how automation impacted factory jobs, digital media disrupted traditional journalism. You know, the same is happening in AI, but you don't know what's next, right? The next industry mover or shaker could be just around the corner. You know, I was a school teacher for 10 years. That was my career. I thought, oh, teaching is so secure. You always need teachers, right? And I'll always have a job.

Wrong.

Right now with COVID you know, after Covid, with Zoom and people going online to learn and to take lessons from a teacher, you don't need one teacher per 30 students. You can do one teacher per 300 students now, right? So it's so easy for you to lose your job because of advancements, because of changes of the way society's moving of technology, so it's not as secure as you may think. This is why I love the quote by Jim Rohn that says work harder on yourself than your job. Because if you build your own value, if you get better and better, if you get smarter, if you read more books, if you pick up more skills, you're able to reinvest in your career with those skills in whatever you create. But if you work super hard on your job and not on yourself, what happens is that you just basically build on quicksand because that job is not. Is guaranteed. It's not guaranteed to be there all the time. The second point I want to make when it comes to why you're 9 to 5 is risky is limited financial growth and wealth creation. Here's the bottom line. You will not get rich with a job. Even doctors and lawyers, they're exchanging time for money. If they have to be there, they will never actually have abundant wealth because as they grow their practice, as they continue to get better and better as a doctor, the expenses get higher. Their personal lifestyle gets more and more expensive as you may experience. So you're not really able to leverage anything. You're not able to leverage your time or labor or skills because you're exchanging time for money, right? And the way to get out of that is through a business is through creating something that creates the wealth for you. Not you yourself, not your time, not the hours of the day that you put in. In most nine to five jobs, there's a cap on how much you can earn. So you might get a promotion, might get a raise, but there's a limit. There's a stark contrast to entrepreneurs or investors who where they can earn incredible multiples on their time, on their investment, on their effort, right? Earning potential is far greater. Think about all the rich people in the world, even celebrities like athletes. There's a lot of professional athletes that go broke years after they retire because they stop playing, they stop getting paid, and they haven't built an asset that makes them money. They don't have a vehicle to generate wealth. They didn't make the right investments, they didn't build any businesses. They just relied on the fact that, hey, I'm a superstar and I'll just keep playing. And once they stop playing, no money, right? Versus entrepreneurs. The people that are quite famous now, the Bezos of the world, the Sarah Blakely is of the world, Oprah, right? They've created these assets that allow them to earn wealth regardless of how old they get. And even if they don't work, right? Even if they're on a beach somewhere, their business is earning them wealth, it's earning them money. But let's not go to Oprah, right? Consider somebody who starts a side business or invests in real estate. Over time they can build significant wealth and they can build something that's just not possible with their salary alone. You hear this term passive income. Now, nothing's really passive, right? Even you know, if you buy real estate and you rent it out, there is active things you need to do, right? You need to maintain the home, you need to make sure there's a tenant, you need to make sure there's maintenance. You got to make sure you pay all your bills and taxes and all that kind of stuff. Stuff. There's things you have to do, right? Maybe there's not a lot of things to do, but there's just real passive income other than just putting your money in the bank or in the stock market and just letting it sit there forever and earn you a dividend or earn you interest. But when you create a business versus a job, like in a job, when I was in a job, I was teaching, right? I got paid when I showed up to work, I got paid when I did the work. And that's how I got paid, right? That was my salary, right? When I didn't show up, if I decided to take, you know, six months off, they're not going to pay me, right? That's that simple. But with a business, what happens here is that you invest your efforts, your time, your money, your talents, talents of other people. And you put it into this thing called the business. And you're able to get exponential returns on that effort, right? It's not like one for one, right? Like I, I work one hour and I get X amount of dollars. No, in business I can work 1 hour and get 10x20x100x return on that hour because of the investment I'm making. And then what happens is that every hour I invest in the business, it compounds, it adds upon the other hour and increases my earning potential. Let me give you a real life example. I built a software company called webinar ninja over 10 years that I grew and recently sold to Proprofs. And in those 10 years, right in the beginning, I worked really hard. We built the software, we put it out to customers or served our customers. We hired people to do the customer service. We did all this work. The first year was really intensive. The second year was intensive. Of the third year, we started to grow. We started to hire designers, hire interesting salespeople, people that run our webinars. We started to really expand. As I started to invest more and more in the business, the less work I actually had to do, right? I was still responsible, I was still managing people. And the more I earned, the more the business earned, the more sales we made. Now, a couple of things are happening here. Number one, the revenue that the business is making, the sales that we're making is continuing to grow. As I'm adding effort, as I'm adding more things to the business, the more revenue we're making. But the value of the business also grows. There's a difference between how much we're making and the value of the business. The value is how much the business is worth. And like I mentioned, we sold the business. So when the business is ready to be sold, there's a lot of value in this business. Over time, there's been all this investment, and when somebody buys it, like, wow, this is really valuable. You've put a lot into a lot of work, a lot of planning, a lot of systems, right? You have all these customers. You have this. A steady stream of customers are coming in. It's easy for me to pick up the pieces and to run with it and to grow it, right? So that has value. And then you can sell this business and gain more from them financially. You can't sell your job, right? You're going to work, you're going to clock in, you're going to clock out, you're going to get paid. At the end of the day, when you leave that job, it's over. My third point is time, investment and life balance. And it makes me think of this idea of life for money trade, this trade between life and money. In a 9 to 5, you're trading a significant portion of your life for a salary. Like, that's exactly what's happening. You are giving your employer your life, right? Your hours of time is your life, right? If your job doesn't fulfill you or if you feel like it detaches you or distracts you from your personal growth or health or family time, this trade off may not be worth it. Okay? A lot of people, in order to earn a lot of money in their job, they. They really burn the candle on both ends. They sacrifice their health, they sacrifice their time with family, they sacrifice their mental health, they sacrifice enjoying their time. They're like, I just got to grind it out to make money so I can be able to, you know, support my family or to be an earner, right? This is Something you really need to think about because you only have one life, okay? You only have whatever age you are right now. So say, for example, you're 35 years old, right? You're only gonna be 35 once and then it's gonna take over to 36. And then 37, 38, it's gone forever over, right? So how do you want to spend that time? You're gonna earn money anyway because you gotta survive, right? You might as well earn it by doing something that fulfills you, that makes you feel like you're making a difference in the world, that gives you significance, that makes you feel like you're actually investing your time in something that's worth your time, right? How many people you know, work long hours that really sacrifice their health, sacrifice time with family, miss special events? Lots, right? And it's because they bought this lie that, oh, if I just work hard, things will pan out. No, you gotta be smarter than that. Your life is worth more than that, okay?

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Another aspect. When it comes to your life and your wealth and your money and your job and all that kind of stuff and how this all works together is your right as an entrepreneur. One of the best things is that you have autonomy over your time when you can do anything right. I get to choose when I do my meetings, I get to choose when I create my content. I get to choose when I do my business or when I do my sales. Webinars or when I do whatever I want to do, right? I'm going to get the work done, but I get to choose when to do this so I can work around my life and the things that are important, like my health, like my exercise, like having a good breakfast in the morning, like having a not rushed dinner, okay? And when you have a job, you can't control that. You have to mostly be in the hours they prescribe, right? You might have some flexibility here or there, but you're still responsible for those hours. Okay? So you want to make sure that you keep this in mind. Your health is super important. The two things that I think that a lot of people neglect, most people in this world neglect two things is their financial health and their physical health. Also their mental and their spiritual health as well, but health in general. They worry about everything else and they don't get these things in order. Their health and their finances, right? And these are the two things that entrepreneurship really help you with. Now, I'm not saying that every entrepreneur is super healthy. There's still a choice here that needs to be made to be healthy. But it gives you an opportunity to be healthy. It gives you more of a chance to be healthy because of that time flexibility. It also allows you to earn more so that you can spend more on your health. Listen, it's so much easier to be healthy when you can just order healthy meals, right? And not have to cook them. It's so much easier to be healthy when you can go to a great gym that has great facilities, that's close by, right? It's so much easier to be healthy to get a personal trainer when you can afford a personal trainer to be on top of you and show you exactly how to exercise and how to be healthy, right? And that's not easy when you have a limited fixed income with your job and with entrepreneurship. The sky's the limit with your earning potential and you're able to take care of these problems, solve for your health with the money that you're earning. Number four, lack of autonomy and flexibility. And this is reason number one for me why I left my job, why I left my career as a teacher. I think my siblings, my sisters would tell you that one of the things I used to say a lot as a kid is, don't tell me what to do, right? I always say that. I still kind of say that under my breath maybe, but I don't like to be told what to do. I like to have autonomy. I like to have flexibility. I want to do what I want to Do I don't want to have to do anything, right? And that is basically the definition of a job is you have to do certain things for the company because that's what they want you to do, right? And that's how you keep your job. There's so many rules, there's so many policies, there's so many things you got to keep in mind, right? There's no room for you to be flexible or even insert your own creativity and make your own decisions, right? People in most jobs are confined to a certain number of parameters and they got to play this game, this dance with their job so they can keep it, right? And it's really frustrating, I know, because I was in a 9 to 5 job as a teacher for over a decade, right? A 9 to 5 job often dictates when, where, how you work, right? The lack of control that you can feel is like a form of modern day servitude, right? Where your life's rhythm is set by the employer rather than your own desires and needs and your own inclinations, your own talents, your own skills, right? And I really think this is something that you need to consider. That autonomy, that ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want. It's such a gift. And if you taste it once, you'll never go back. Don't get me wrong, you have obligations as a business owner, but you get to fulfill those obligations the way you want, right? You get to make the rules, you get to choose the structure, you get to change the structure that you already built yourself, right? You don't like the way you built it, rebuild it. It's your world, it's your utopia. My last point deals with fulfillment and how your job is not really sustainable when it comes to fulfilling you for the rest of your life, whatever career you're in. Because what happens is when once you're in a job, you start to realize, or a career, you start to realize the world is quite small, that you live in that corporate structure, that organization, that even that market, right? But when I became an entrepreneur, especially when I became a full time entrepreneur at the age of 32, the world just opened up. I just realized, wow, I now can impact the world rather than just the students I'm teaching in the classroom, right? In my case, or the clients that you're serving in the job. I'm blown away by what we were able to do with this podcast. With over 250 million downloads, thousands and thousands and thousands of people listening to us around the world, helping people grow their Business. The impact I'm able to make is so rewarding and fulfilling. I can't wait to record my next episode. Right. I never had that feeling in my job because I just felt like the world was small. I was stuck. I was just kind of day in and day out, I felt like I was teaching the same students every year, just different bodies. Right. But when I became an entrepreneur, I realized, wow, I have a way to connect with so many people, have a way now to be able to make an impact in a big way. Even if you're not a public figure, your business can make an impact. Your business can make a difference in a lot of people's lives. And to me, that is fulfilling. That is going to be enough juice to keep you going for the rest of your life. And I want to leave you off with a reality check. Just being honest with you. The company you work for right now, if you're in a 9 to 5 job, their responsibility is for the company, right? They are responsible for the health of the company, for the sustainability of the business, not you. Right. They might like you, they might appreciate you, but they need to cut you. They're going to cut you in a second. Have no doubt about that. Okay? And yes, you can go to another company and go to another business, but that's a hassle. You got to reestablish yourself. All the things you invested in that business, in that company, you're going to have to redo. Oh, my gosh. It gives me a heartache just thinking about it. Right. I have a friend of mine that was in a really good marketing position in a big multinational company, lost his job, made redundant at 51 and couldn't find a job for months. In fact, he just decided he can't find a job. It's been three years since that happened and he's just decided to be a stay at home dad. There's a lot of financial pressure now on his wife. It's really tough for him right now because he's at an age where companies are, you know, hiring young people because they're less expensive and they're more trainable and he's not old enough to retire yet. Yet. It's a weird situation he's in. And it's all because he just thought the job would be great and he just thought it wasn't risky. And indeed it is risky. Okay? And he's got nothing to fall back on like a business that he built because he just put all his eggs in that income stream, that job. So I think I made a pretty compelling argument. I think that you are convinced so this is the whole reason why I started the $100 MBA. To make it easier for people to start businesses, to be financially free, to have that autonomy, to be fulfilled, have that risk. By the way, every business has multiple income streams, right? Many businesses have this, where they make money on this, that and the other thing, right? For example, this business, the 100 BA make money through sponsorships, make money through memberships of the hundred dollar ba, make money through products, money made through affiliate commission. There's all these streams that I can rely on. So if one is slowing down, I have another that's going to cover my back, right? And this is the beauty of business, is that you can create all these revenue streams. And by the way, that's just one business. You can create another business if you like. And it's just a fun game. Thanks for tuning in to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. I'm Omar Zinholm. Hope you found this episode valuable and you're rethinking how risky your actual 9 to 5 job is. Okay. And if you want to build that business on the side or you want to start going into full time entrepreneurship, we got a ton of insights and resources over our website 100 MBA net. I give away most of my things for free because I want to help people have an easier path than I did. Thanks again and I'll check you in the next episode. Take care.

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